


Better Than Revenge

by fireflyslove



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (eventually) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fix-It, Gen, Handwavery, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Time Travel Fix-It, listen they're gonna time travel the Star Trek way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-10 11:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14736032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflyslove/pseuds/fireflyslove
Summary: Nebula, Thor, Shuri, Rocket, and Steve slingshot around the sun to save everyone's lives and finally peel the skin off Thanos' face.





	Better Than Revenge

**Author's Note:**

> Or, time travel with the Star Trek method because the Time Stone is unreliable and I want slingshotting to be a viable method that Nebula has only heard about that one time in a dingy bar as a secret, but Shuri has done all the calculations and it could actually work. Oh, and everyone (Gamora, Loki, and Heimdall included) is going to make it out of this one. 
> 
> Fair warning, I'm not a huge fan of Tony aaaand Nebula might be living out some of my fantasies of what I wanted to do to him after this movie, so if you're a Tony stan, you might want to avoid this one. Your opinions are totally fine, I just don't share them. 
> 
> As usual for my MCU fics, title is after the Taylor Swift song

Trapped on a tiny orange world wasn’t exactly the way Nebula had planned to spend the day. Being suspended for the last year with her body parts slowly being pulled apart was somehow preferable to this, though. The human would _not stop whining_. His friends were dead, he was stuck here _alone_ , his son (?) was dead, he could never _forgive_ himself. The sounds were grating on her already strained nerves, and it wasn’t like there was anyone else here to blame her for her actions, so she gave him a small tap on the back of the neck and he dropped like a rock. A punch to the face might have been more satisfying, but there would be blood, and Nebula, for once, wasn’t in a mood to deal with blood.

As much as she would have liked to leave him here, she got the feeling that he might be important. If nothing else, the human’s planet was where Thanos had gone, and if she was going to actually _do_ anything about the bastard, she’d have to start there. So she peeled off the remaining parts of his armor, tossed them aside, and hoisted him onto her shoulder. Quill’s ship had to be parked around here somewhere, it was the only way off this world, given that Nebula had destroyed her own transport on Thanos’ face.

She found it parked behind a large boulder, doors still open. She entered and dropped the human on the first seat, fastened the straps around him, and went to the pilot’s seat. It was inexplicably sticky, and she felt the crunch of crumbs under her thighs as she sat down. The interface sprang to life, and she spent a good ten minutes trying to decipher it. The ship itself was modern among most space-faring vessels, but the nav system looked like it had been designed by a bunch of demented Pylian monkeys. It was a series of unlabeled buttons in primary colors. Finally, she gave up and went to the copilot’s seat. Here, at least, was a familiar interface, the one a ship of this size should have had.

The engines spun to life, and she lifted off from the ground, into atmo, and then out into space. This world was a moon, orange atmosphere shrouding its ground. Its planet was a large gas giant, rings and a few dozen other moons in orbit around it. It was starkly beautiful in the way that large celestial bodies often were, completely barren of life (well, sentient life), and monolithic in their vastness. Unfortunately, it did not come with a signpost pointing the way to the human’s home planet. And given what little Nebula knew about humans, they were not yet a space faring civilization.

The ship’s database was sadly lacking in any direction on where “Earth” was, or even what sector of the galaxy it was in. She knew that the moon they had just left was called Titan, but there was no entry for Titan in the nav system. Nebula gritted her teeth and looked over at the human. He _had_ to know something about his own solar system, surely they all wouldn’t be as dense as Quill was… had been. She firmly tamped down any emotions she might have had and went to where she had left the human. He was still out; her love tap might have been harder than she had thought. A shake to the shoulder did nothing, so she went to the sink, filled a vessel with water and dumped it on his head.

He came to sputtering and blinking. Being restrained clearly didn’t agree with him, and he clawed at the straps.

“What the fuck?” he sputtered. “Who are you? Where am I?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Nebula said. Her patience for inanity was nonexistent at the best of times. “Where are you from?”

“New York,” he replied, “You?”

Again the urge to just punch his smug face washed over her, but she needed the information more than she needed to shut him up again.

“You’re human, you’re from Earth, yes?”

“Yes?”

“Good. Now where is Earth?”

“I… what?”

Nebula gave a loud, exasperated sigh, and walked across the deck to lean her forehead against the wall there. It was an exercise grounded in her childhood, before Thanos, her parents had encouraged discipline in mind and body, and this had been a frequent punishment, meant to calm the raging spirit and center the mind. It worked to a degree, and when she turned back to the human, her simmering rage had subsided for the moment.

“We are in space. Clearly you got here somehow. Do you know how?”

“Stowed away on a spaceship,” he said. “It piloted itself.”

“So you have no idea where you came from?” she asked.

“No. I’ve only been to space once, and it was a rather traumatizing experience, what with the wormhole and all,” he said.

“Clearly,” Nebula said. “Describe your solar system. Maybe I can find something like it in the navigation database.”

“You don’t know where we are, either?” he asked. “I would think an alien would know where they were.”

She shot him a sharp look. “I’m not the alien here.”

“Touché,” he said.

“Your solar system,” she prompted again.

“Medium sized yellow star, eight planets, a few dwarf planets, asteroid belt between the fourth and fifth planets,” he said. “Is that enough?”

“That describes almost every inhabited system in the galaxy,” she said. “Does your species know _anything_ about your planets or surrounding stars?”

“First four planets are rocky, two have atmospheres, the outer four are gas giants, one of those has pretty massive rings, one is tilted off its normal axis, there’s a bunch of moons. Oh, and there’s a dwarf planet beyond the eighth planet that has a moon almost half the size of the dwarf planet.”

She searched the nav database for something matching those more specific parameters, but still came up dry. The human was saying something, but she wasn’t really listening. Options exhausted, she brought up a map of the solar system they were in now, and studied it idly, hoping some inspiration would come out of it. But the map… eight planets… an asteroid belt… the star was roughly “medium sized”…

“Human,” she said, interrupting a stream of invectives. She tilted the ship so it was facing the planet they had just left orbit of, and pointed to it. “Does this planet look familiar?”

“Holy shit,” the human said. “That’s Saturn.”

Nebula didn’t laugh often… or ever. But the hysterical laughter that burst out of her at that moment nearly moved her out of her seat. Thanos’ own homeworld was in the very solar system that housed not one, but _two_ Infinity Stones.

“What?” the human shouted. Nebula didn’t bother to answer. It was clear which of the planets in this system was Earth, only one of them had an atmosphere that was breathable by humans. She set a course for it, and spooled up the FTL drive. The ship’s sub-light engines were fast, but the less time she had to spend in this musty ship, the better. It was a blink and then they were in view of a blue and green planet.

“Jesus Christ,” the human said. “That’s Earth.”

“That was the idea,” Nebula said. Where to land on the planet was the next question. The biggest population center? No, that wouldn’t be where Thanos had gone. Thanos would have gone where the Infinity Stones were, and that place would likely have a signature from the landing of space vessels. A scan of the planet revealed trails from ships entering the atmosphere, landing nearly in the center of a large continent. The land they had touched down on fairly vibrated with some odd reading, and it took a few moments to calibrate the ship’s sensors. They finally revealed a huge amount of an unidentified metal that was unlike anything else on the planet. Nebula aimed the ship for the center of the region of metal and entered the atmosphere.

The descent was quick, and soon the landing thrusters were firing. It was clear that she was landing in the middle of a battlefield, and she recognized some of the scattered bodies as being creatures of Thanos’ armies. So he had been here, and from the looks of things, had already left. The ship touched down gently, and she hit the switch for the door to open. She had expected the human to extricate himself from the simple restraining harness by now, but he was still struggling with the straps. As she passed him on the way out the door, Nebula pressed the latch on the clasp to release them. Descending the steps, she walked into a wave of heat and dust.

The battlefield smelled like most battlefields, unpleasant, and one of her least favorite “enhancements” kicked to life, picking apart the scents and categorizing them. Nebula ignored it, as she usually did, and took stock of the situation. There was no one in close range of the ship, but that was likely because the engines generated a great amount of heat when it landed. The turf under the engines was singed and smoldering. The figures off in the distance looked as though they were grouping, preparing for something…

To attack the ship that had just landed, probably. She heard a noise behind her, and turned to grab the human. She gripped him by the back of the neck.

“You must make them understand,” she said. “That I am not Thanos and I am not with Thanos.”

He only gulped.

A small detachment of humans approached, and Nebula could tell from the way they walked that they were heavily armed. They were within a dozen yards when she realized that they were not all human. With them was the animal who had travelled with Gamora and a being who might appear human to unaided eyes, but who Nebula’s ocular implants read as pure danger.

“Who are you?” one of the humans, a bearded man, asked, sharply. “And more importantly, are you with Thanos?”

Nebula spit to the side. “No,” she said. “I believe this is yours.” She pushed the human she had a grip on toward them. The animal spoke next.

“Nebula… the rest of them… where are they?” it asked, peering around her to look into the ship

“Gone,” Nebula said. “He turned them to dust, with half the life in the galaxy. But he killed Gamora first. His favorite daughter and he killed her with his own hands to achieve _this_. She knew where the Soul Stone was and she told him to save _me._ ”

“You know Thanos?” the not-human asked, a barely contained rage in his voice.

She looked him in the eyes, eyes which didn’t quite match. “He stole me from my family as a child, murdered my parents, and then spent most of my life replacing my body with cybernetic implants. I have a strong desire to take him apart piece by piece, but…” she looked around here, at the destruction, “I will have my vengeance another day. There is a way to prevent this, but I… cannot do it alone.”

The very admission made her feel itchy and as if she needed to flee the place, relying on others went against her very programming, but it was the only way out of this, so here she would stay until she could peel the skin from Thanos’ face.

**Author's Note:**

> @anakinslefthand on Tumblr


End file.
